That way, people of all races could begin to reflect on who this man was and what he meant for South Africa, writes Xolela Mangcu.
Johannesburg - It’s now 39 years since South Africa’s greatest prophet, Bantu Stephen Biko, was brutally killed by a bunch of brutes in an apartheid jail.
As the great Sydney Kentridge memorably put it: “Steve Biko died a miserable and lonely death on a mat on a stone floor in a prison cell.” But the government has not seen fit to honour Biko in any significant way beyond a bridge in East London.
The rulers had neither the generosity nor courage to name the East London airport after Biko. Over the past 20 years, I’ve been asking for something more substantial - a national holiday in Biko’s name. A call for a national holiday doesn’t mean people must stay away from work or children from school. I wouldn’t want anything to be closed. That way, people of all races could begin to reflect on who this man was and what he meant for South Africa.
I believe that, with some modification, Black Consciousness can be the touchstone of a new national consciousness. I say this with some modification because we don’t live under the same political conditions that gave rise to Black Consciousness. Take, for example, the Black Consciousness definition of blackness as “those who are by law and tradition politically, socially and economically discriminated against and identify as a unit towards the realisation of their aspiration”. Clearly, black people are no longer oppressed and exploited by law.
The multiplicity of black political parties also means we cannot talk of a united black political identity. Even back then there were as many different views about the liberation struggle as there were black people.
And so, instead of the political project of Black Consciousness, I’ve been arguing for a cultural project or what I call the Consciousness of Blackness.
In other words, even though there is really no rationale for a unified political identity, there exists within the black community a commonly shared experience, which has often been expressed through what Henry Louis Gates jr calls the “shared text of blackness”: “Texts written over two centuries ago address what we might think of as common subjects of condition that continue to be strangely resonant, and relevant as we approach the 21st century.”
That is exactly the resonance I feel when I read Tiyo Soga or SEK Mqhayi or Sol Plaatje and Steve Biko. In 1865 Soga called on black people to write their cultural history. Pixley Seme, Mqhayi, DDT Jabavu, Es’kia Mphahlele, Robert Sobukwe and Biko said the same thing across that 100-year span.
This doesn’t mean there are unchanging and similar modes of representation in how black people have responded to their condition in different times and contexts. There were always processes of revision and contextualisation.
How are we to overcome post-apartheid racism? That is where Biko comes in. Five decades ago he argued that even white people who don’t consider themselves racist still saw themselves as culturally superior to black people. This was the result of a centuries-old social and cultural conditioning that is beyond the reach of superficial political and economic critiques of racism. What we are dealing with is a deeply embedded racial ontology that gave worth to human beings on the basis of their skin colour and presented it in a distorted narrative of human civilisation that starts only 500 years ago.
Thousands of years of human achievement were wiped out to fit this narrative. As Biko put it: “No longer was reference made to African culture, it became barbarism. Africa was the dark continent’. Religious practices and customs were referred to as superstition. The history of African society was reduced to tribal battles and internecine wars.”
In his book Secure the Base, Ngugi wa Thiong’o points to the absurdity of the use of the word “tribe” in reference to African people but hardly to other groups, this despite the fact that the word “tribe” doesn’t have an equivalent in African languages.
But in South Africa this term was extended to describe large, widely diffused groups of people such as Xhosas, Zulus, Sothos. All the while, European groups described themselves as nations. Only Africans have tribes because this was required to justify the homeland system. From “tribe” it was a short hop to “primitive”, “backward” and “dark races”.
If these cultural tropes sought to demean black people, Biko suggested Black Consciousness as an antidote, but not just for black people: “Black Consciousness therefore seeks to give positivity to the outlook of black people to their problems. It works on the knowledge that white hatred is negative though understandable, and leads to precipitate and shotgun methods which may be disastrous for black and white alike. It seeks to channel the pent-up forces of the angry black masses to meaningful and directional opposition basing its entire struggle on realities of the situation.”
If the pent-up forces of the past were channelled through the oppositional political activism of Black Consciousness, I suggest those forces now need to be channelled through a creative, cultural “Consciousness of Blackness”. This would require that both black and white South Africans should immerse themselves in the black historical experience and the values of freedom and equality it generated. We could start by having a day in Biko’s name.
* Mangcu is professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town and a Harry Oppenheimer Fellow at Harvard University.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent